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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Toxicol.
Sec. Computational Toxicology and Informatics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/ftox.2025.1535098
This article is part of the Research Topic Educational Frontiers in Computational Toxicology: Building the Future Workforce View all articles

TAME 2.0: Expanding and Improving Online Data Science Training for Environmental Health Research

Provisionally accepted
Alexis Payton Alexis Payton 1Elise Hickman Elise Hickman 1Jessie Chappel Jessie Chappel 1Kyle R. Roell Kyle R. Roell 1Lauren E Koval Lauren E Koval 1Lauren A Eaves Lauren A Eaves 1Chloe K Chou Chloe K Chou 1Allison Spring Allison Spring 1Sarah L Miller Sarah L Miller 1Oyemwenosa N Avenbaum Oyemwenosa N Avenbaum 1Rebecca Boyles Rebecca Boyles 1Paul Kruse Paul Kruse 2Cynthia Rider Cynthia Rider 3Grace Patlewicz Grace Patlewicz 2Caroline Ring Caroline Ring 2Cavin Ward-Caviness Cavin Ward-Caviness 2David M Reif David M Reif 3Ilona Jaspers Ilona Jaspers 1Rebecca Fry Rebecca Fry 1Julia Rager Julia Rager 1*
  • 1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, United States
  • 2 United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Washington, District of Columbia, United States
  • 3 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIH), Durham, North Carolina, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Data science training has the potential to propel environmental health research efforts into territories that remain untapped and holds immense promise to change our understanding of human health and the environment. Though data science training resources are expanding, they are still limited in terms of public accessibility, user friendliness, breadth of content, tangibility through real-world examples, and applicability to the field of environmental health science. To fill this gap, we developed an environmental health data science training resource, the inTelligence And Machine lEarning (TAME) Toolkit, version 2.0 (TAME 2.0). TAME 2.0 is a publicly available website that includes training modules organized into seven chapters. Training topics were prioritized based upon ongoing engagement with trainees, professional colleague feedback, and emerging topics in the field of environmental health research (e.g., artificial intelligence and machine learning). TAME 2.0 is a significant expansion upon the original TAME training resource pilot. TAME 2.0 specifically includes training organized into the following chapters: (1) Data management to enable scientific collaborations;(2) Coding in R; (3) Basics of data analysis and visualizations; (4) Converting wet lab data into dry lab analyses; (5) Machine learning; (6) Applications in toxicology and exposure science; and (7) Environmental health database mining. Also new to TAME 2.0 are 'Test Your Knowledge' activities at the end of each training module, in which participants are asked additional module-specific questions about the example datasets and apply skills introduced in the module to answer them. TAME 2.0 effectiveness was evaluated via participant surveys during graduate-level workshops and coursework, as well as undergraduate-level summer research training events, and suggested edits were incorporated while overall metrics of effectiveness were quantified. Collectively, TAME 2.0 now serves as a valuable resource to address the growing demand of increased data science training in environmental health research. TAME 2.0 is publicly available at: https://uncsrp.github.io/TAME2/.

    Keywords: coding, computational toxicology, data science, Data visualizations, Exposure science, health research, machine learning, Training within academic training curriculum Agency-level data science training priorities have been

    Received: 26 Nov 2024; Accepted: 13 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Payton, Hickman, Chappel, Roell, Koval, Eaves, Chou, Spring, Miller, Avenbaum, Boyles, Kruse, Rider, Patlewicz, Ring, Ward-Caviness, Reif, Jaspers, Fry and Rager. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Julia Rager, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.